Week 14/15 in Review

It's so funny how things work out since letter J ended up falling right at the beginning of our month of Christmas celebrating.  There was an alternate theme for our Letter of the Week print outs, but Jesus fit just perfectly for us!

Verse: "But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all people." Luke 2:10
Songs: Joy to the World
and Jingle Bells (which I had bells for the girls to dance with)

Charlotte's shelf has: Jesus dry erase pictures, J puzzles (where you match the dot to the lower case letter), Jesus puzzle from Letter of the Week, Nativity floor puzzle (that I scored at a garage sale), Little people nativity set, and number cards to count stars onto.

I don't think we did much creative stuff on their bulletin board.  Most of it is from church.  Then there is a big sheet of stickers from all the doctor's visits we had.  A favorite was the foam Christmas and Snowman stickers.  On the middle blue one, you can see that Caroline used lots of white bits to spell out her name.

Here are my Monday students after they finished their matching workbooks.  Caroline is doing a workbook with more J writing practice while the preschoolers work on their do-a-dot pictures. 

Caroline learned about vertebrates this week.  I pulled a bunch of plastic bugs and animals and had her sort them.  She picked up pretty quickly on what had a backbone and what did not.  So add that to her big science vocabulary... nocturnal and vertebrate.

There were not many letter J CVC words for spelling this week, so I we learned God and Jesus .

Week 15 ended up getting lumped in since we were all sick.  I got my flu shot after Thanksgiving and was sick ever since.  Then the girls had ear infections, followed by a never ending cough for Caroline, and then sinus infections for both.  We never got to letter K.

We did manage to make a countdown chain for both of the girls.  Charlotte lost interest pretty quick.  Caroline, is all concerned about fairness these days and noted often who had the shorter chain, due to unequal circumferences of their links.

I don't have pictures, but PE was a huge hit this month.  I tried these Christmas action cards for a week and the girls loved them so much that we just did them the rest of the month.  "Roll like an ornament, sneak like an elf, twist like a candy cane..." sure beats jumping jacks.  Charlotte learned the pictures and liked to take her turn being in charge.

We tried out another neat Pinterest find with Math Power Towers.  We worked on them with our twos facts, which seems to be taking us two months to master.    Things seemed to be going really well until I realized someone was able to see enough of the answer through the cup to get it right.  I also tried it with stickers, but they won't stay stuck.  I feel like trashing the entire idea... however neat it may be.

Why didn't I think of wearing my wedding dress to arts and crafts time?

One of the great things about homeschooling is that I have the option to reinforce something when it's needed.  I'm still learning to let go of my plans and follow the instinct though.  I'd noticed Caroline looking at our ABC chart often to write her lowercase B and D.  I'd seen a bat/ball and doorknob/door idea somewhere online, so I made up a quick craft project to help reinforce the idea.  It turned out really cute, I think.